When Apple launched the iPhone exclusively on AT&T’s crumby edge network — and I refused to buy one for that reason — I predicted that Apple’s real endgame was to break the wireless carriers’ stranglehold on handsets, so that Apple could sell iPhones on any network. Sure enough, Verizon just announced that next year […]

The most striking aspect of the reactions to my “Mobile Web Sucks” post — which was much more about my own frustrations as a USER than any kind of industry analysis — was the overt hostility that many respondents displayed towards me as a user of the mobile web, and to the many who chimed […]

This weekend we drove from our home in Leesburg, VA to visit my wife’s family in Staten Island, NY. Along the way, we passed through rural areas of Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. I had my laptop with me, which we used while we were driving. I used my Blackberry 8830 as a tethered modem, […]

I presented at an internal conference for the interactive division of a major media company this week, and among all the conference attendees, I didn’t see a single iPhone. Not one. It was wall-to-wall Blackberries, including many Blackberry 8830s, which have only been out for a month, so it’s not that they aren’t buying the […]

Ok, so shame on me for writing so much about the iPhone without actually having used it, but I fixed that today by spending a couple of hours in an Apple store playing with the iPhone. Granted this is much more limited than the experience of long-term use, but it was enough for me to […]

I took a lot of flack for suggesting that iPhone buyers were blind to the significant impact the poor AT&T network would have on their experience and that, despite this (or rather because of it), iPhone would be so successful it would give Apple the leverage to fundamentally change the wireless industry.

So here’s a quick […]

No, I’m not turning Publishing 2.0 into an iPhone-only blog, but the debate over how revolutionary the iPhone is as a media device and as a mobile device on the AT&T network is as at the white hot center of the evolution of media. Fascinating, to say the least. You can see my collected, evolving, […]

Steve Jobs isn’t stupid. He knows that AT&T Wireless sucks. So why lock the revolutionary iPhone into a crappy network?

Because Jobs knows that everyone will buy an iPhone anyway, even if they hate the network. And that, as Umair points out, shifts all the power to Apple.

For all the hype and criticism of the iPhone, one thing is undeniable — people are willing to stand in line for it (via Engadget):

Would anyone stand in line for your product?

A question everyone else in tech/media should ponder.

This is a follow-up to my post on why I didn’t buy an iPhone, i.e. because the AT&T network sucks. I’ve been amazed at how the iPhone has caused so many tech commentators to be blind to the network problem. Valleywag’s iPhone scorecard really made it hit home for me, when I saw the high […]

I just bought a Blackberry 8830 from Verizon, forgoing the opportunity to be among the first iPhone owners. This decision surprised me because I had been eagerly looking forward to the iPhone after praising it as a truly innovative product, despite much tech geek snarking. And now that the mainstream tech pundocracy has weighted in, […]

Never underestimate Steve Jobs. After all of the hand-wringing over Apple’s iPhone being a closed platform, today Apple announced that the iPhone will indeed be open to third-party applications — ingeniously, through integration with Apple’s Safari web browser, which has just been released for Windows (which itself is a huge smack against Microsoft, which has […]

Apple turned in a record $1 billon quarterly profit after selling 21 million iPods — yeah, that closed system strategy is sure weighing them down — when the iPhone hits the market, they’ll probably sink like a stone.

Speaking of which, from the genius mind of Loren Feldman at 1938 Media:

Dave Winer and many others don’t like that Apple’s iPhone is a closed device, which doesn’t allow you to change the software or use other software. While I can appreciate how frustrating it must be for people like Dave with the skill and desire to customize their tech products to better suit their needs, they […]

Instances of REAL innovation are so painfully rare, so few and far between. There’s so much HYPE, so much hollow, empty promise, it just weights you down — but there’s nothing like the head rush of experiencing real innovation — and that’s exactly what Apple delivered to today with the wildly anticipated and obsessively hyped […]